The Book of Imaginings
by Vol lady
Summary: On Thanksgiving 1880, Jarrod realizes his son J.J. may live into the 1950s and wonders what the world will be like then. He puts his imaginings into a book, and in 1950 a 70-year-old J.J. looks back on all the things his father imagined (automobiles? levitating pool tables?).
1. Chapter 1

The Book of Imaginings

Chapter 1

Thanksgiving 1880

The nickname "J.J." was sticking solid. Even his parents called him by that name, and it was the one he responded to the most. Jarrod felt a touch jealous that his son – Jarrod Jr. – was not going by his name, but then he imagined about 25 years into the future when "J.J. Barkley" - assuming he kept the moniker - was beginning his legal career, and he liked it. There was a dignity to it, and it gave his son a place of his own, not one tacked onto his father's name.

Jarrod wondered for a moment, as he watched his son sleeping in the crib Nick had made for him (he outgrew the cradle fast), if there really was a heaven above, and he would be watching from there when his son tried his first case in court. But then again, maybe J.J. would not want to be a lawyer, and who knew what opportunities would be available to him in 25 years anyway? The world was changing fast, and the change seemed to be speeding up. Jarrod wished he would be around to see a lot of it. He knew he wouldn't be, but one of the things he was most thankful for on this Thanksgiving Day was that his son would be around for them.

He wondered if he could imagine what changes J.J. would see. Born into a world where his parents were thrilled to have indoor plumbing and a comfortable buggy, J.J. would see incredible changes before the end of his life came, Jarrod knew that for sure. Jarrod liked to pretend he could foresee some of them. He liked to think that electricity would come even to the Barkley ranch before too long – somehow. He liked to think that the horseless carriages that some people were talking about would come before the turn of the century.

Then Jarrod thought more about the turn of the century and his imagination ran out of ideas about the world J.J. might grow into. Maybe it was because his imagination could not fathom what his senses told him might be coming, or maybe it was because he knew he would not be here to see things for himself.

Jarrod put it all aside. Whatever world his son grew up in, it was his job to make sure he got the right start so he would be able to face it. He didn't know how long he would be able to be with his son – he didn't even want to hazard a guess. He just wanted to be thankful that he was here now, that his wife and son were here now, and that in a few hours they would be with the rest of the growing Barkley clan at the mansion, eating and drinking and laughing.

Maggie came beside him as he stood there watching his son. "What are you day dreaming about, Counselor?"

"Everything," Jarrod said. "Just everything."

"What do you mean?"

"All the things that J.J. will see in his life that I can't even imagine. Do you realize, his life span could very well take him into the middle of the 20th century? What do you think life will be like for him?"

"Oh, I don't know. I don't know what life will be like for him next week, much less when he's in his 70s."

Jarrod chuckled a little. "Just think about it, though. In San Francisco now there's a factory that makes electricity for people to use to light their homes. Just think about it – flip a switch and the light goes on. Flip it again and the light goes off. And think of all the things this could lead to – heating homes with electricity as well as lighting them, maybe cooking someday, maybe heating water so you can have hot water as fast as you can push the pump."

Maggie chuckled. "You sure are imaginative today."

"Well, it's Thanksgiving Day. I was thinking how grateful I was for J.J., and for you." Jarrod leaned over and kissed his wife. "I just started to think about what his life would be like. When he's a man – he may decide to have a career that doesn't even exist yet."

"We have to get him out of diapers first," Maggie said.

"That's not that far away. Think about it – before long he'll be climbing up into a saddle and riding off – but when he's a man in his 40s and 50s – will people even be traveling by horseback? Who's to say there won't be buggies that propel themselves and riding horses will just be for recreation? God, I wish I were going to live to see the world he'll grow up in."

Maggie took hold of Jarrod's arm, understanding finally what was driving his musings. "Are you feeling worse lately?"

"Fluid's building up again," Jarrod said. "My breathing gets noisy during the night sometimes and wakes me up."

"Have you talked to the doctor about it?"

"Not yet. I was waiting for the new year to come in."

"Maybe you should see him sooner."

Jarrod turned, looked at his wife's eyes, and drew her close to him. "I don't want to spend these holidays seeing doctors and trying new medications. I want to spend them loving my wife and my son. I want to spend them trying to envision the world my son will grow up in. Maybe that's the only way I can share it with him, by imagining it now."

"Does it make you happy to do that, or sad?"

Jarrod thought. "Both, I guess. It's kind of fun to think that when he's 70 years old and the year is 1950, he'll be able to travel from Washington to San Francisco in hours instead of days. That he might be able to pick up some contraption and talk to his children and grandchildren even if they're a hundred miles away, or maybe even halfway around the world. Just think about that, Maggie. Think of how his life might be then."

"I don't have quite the imagination you do," Maggie said. "Maybe you ought to take some time and write these things down. It would be fun to think that J.J. might have a book of these thoughts to read through when it really is 1950."

Jarrod looked at her again and smiled. "You are one smart lady, you know that?"

"Yeah," Maggie said. "I know that."

XXXXXXX

June 1950

He was nearly 70 years old, still in pretty good shape and able to take care of himself, but his wife had died a decade ago and he was living with his daughter and her husband in San Francisco. His main concern was that his eyesight was failing and it was getting harder to read the morning newspaper. And it was getting almost impossible to read his "Book of Imaginings."

That was what he father wrote on the first page, the title he gave the book of thoughts and pictures he was writing down to leave to him. J.J. Barkley did not remember his father at all – he had died when he was very small. What he knew of Jarrod Barkley Sr. was through stories his grandmother and aunts and uncles told him, and through the sparkle in his mother's eyes whenever he asked her to tell him again how his father would play with him on the floor and they would laugh out loud together. What really reached him though – what made him feel like his father was right here beside him, even now, was his father's "Book of Imaginings."

J.J. had hauled out that book so often throughout his life that he practically had it memorized – a good thing, since it was beginning to wear away from use - but there was still something about seeing his father's handwriting and drawings right there on the page that brought him into the room all these years after he had died. On a day in June in 1950, as J.J. sat in indirect sunlight that came into his bedroom on the north side of his daughter's home, he turned to that book again.

He opened to the first page, that ornate title page that read "Book of Imaginings" that his father had embellished with drawings of stars and comets, and he smiled as he did every time he opened it. J.J. remembered when his mother gave him the book. He was 12 years old and starting to tell her his own musings about his future. She brought the book to him with a big smile.

"Your father made this book for you," she said. "Right after you were born, he started to think about the life you might have and the world you might live in. He wanted to leave his dreams for you so that someday you could read them and see how they matched up to your life as it really happened."

When he was 12, J.J. wasn't wise enough to understand everything that his father had put into this book, but even then it was magical to him. Over the years, he understood more and more that it was himself that Jarrod Sr. had put on these pages. Now that he was 70 and he feared he would not be able to read these words much longer, J.J. Barkley began to read through the book one more time.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Thanksgiving 1880

After a wonderful dinner that left them all too full to go home yet, Jarrod, Nick, Heath and Carl Wheeler plopped themselves down in the library and talked about getting up and playing some pool. Every time they tried, though, they lit another cigar and fell into another conversation instead.

They talked about the food, and then they talked about their women, who were in the living room with Victoria and J.J., doing heaven knew what.

"They're probably talking about us," Nick offered.

"Probably," Carl agreed, and Heath and Jarrod grunted in agreement.

"So, what do you think?" Jarrod asked, looking at Heath and then Nick. "Are weddings in the future for you two?"

Nick and Heath looked at each other. Heath let his lopsided grin show.

Nick just got up and poured himself some whiskey. When he offered up the carafe to the others, they all declined. As Nick sat down again, Jarrod got up and went to the desk in the corner.

"You're not planning on doing any work, are you, Jarrod?" Heath asked.

"No," Jarrod said, "even though our brother would like it if I did get to those contracts he brought over yesterday." Jarrod began to look in the lower drawers in the desk.

"What are you doing?" Nick asked.

"I remember that Father left some empty journals, ones he never started writing in," Jarrod said. "I wanted to appropriate one."

"You ever notice how that brother of yours always uses a two dollar word when a nickel word will do?" Carl said.

"Yeah," Nick said. "You coulda just said 'take' one."

"All right, take," Jarrod said and pulled one of the books he was looking for out of the very bottom drawer. He came back to the sofa and sat down with it.

"You gonna start keeping a journal?" Heath asked.

"Not exactly," Jarrod said, thumbing through the pages to be sure they were blank. "Maggie and I were talking this morning, wondering how the world is gonna change as J.J. grows up. You know, he could live all the way to the 1950s or 1960s. Can you imagine what life will be like then?"

"No," Carl said, "and I don't want to."

"Why not?" Jarrod asked.

"Gives me a headache," Carl said, and the others laughed.

"Maggie suggested I might want to write some of my imaginings down to give to J.J.," Jarrod said. "I thought she had a good idea. I want to leave him something he can read as the years go by, to see if any of these ideas I get actually come true."

"Like flying machines and like that?" Heath asked.

"Yeah," Jarrod said. "And the telephone – somebody's already been working on that. And maybe that horseless carriage some people talk about. It'll be fun to think about things like that and write them down. Maybe J.J. will sit down when he's an old man in the 1950s and he will have seen these kinds of things come about. Maybe he'll have fun seeing if any of the things his old man imagined are things he takes for granted in his life."

"Or were so crazy they never came about," Nick said.

The others were silent for a moment. Jarrod did have a good idea there, leaving his son something of himself that was different from a regular journal. They knew why Jarrod was thinking about such things. They looked at each other, and understood, but left it unsaid.

"That's not a bad idea, Jarrod," Heath said instead.

"It'll give me some diversion, too," Jarrod said. "Nick's got me so wrapped up with deeds and contracts, my head is going around in circles half the time."

"Can't have that," Nick said, and then admitted, "I think you got a good idea there, too, Jarrod. Might do something like that for my own kid someday."

"Well, tell you what," Jarrod said. "Why don't we shoot a game of pool and I can put it right up front in this book of mine? J.J. can see if there are still pool tables around in the 1950s."

XXXXXXX

June 1950

There was a drawing of a pool table on the page that came after the title page in the Book of Imaginings, but this pool table didn't have any legs. _"Here's what I bet you'll be playing pool on, J.J.," his father had written. "It's going to levitate, and instead of having to lean awkwardly and try to find the best way to make a shot on a stationary table, you can adjust this table to however you want it to be. Raise it higher, lower it, do everything except tilt it so much that the balls move. You do that, and the table will buzz real loud and you'll forfeit the game."_

J.J. smiled as he read about his father's idea for pool tables of the future. And yes, pool tables were still around. They were everywhere, in bars and homes and pool halls and bowling alleys. But they did not levitate. They still had legs and were anchored to the ground, and the table and the balls still looked like they did when his father and his uncles played in 1880. At most, his father's levitating pool table looked like a big pinball machine.

"Some things can't be improved upon, Papa," J.J. said and hoped his father was listening.

His father had also written about how he and uncles played pool together. It made J.J. get up and walk out of his house, down to the corner bar where there were two tables. They were full when he got there, so he sat down with a beer and watched. And did his own imagining.

The two men at one table and the third man at another became his uncles Nick, Heath and Carl – men he grew up with and who were his role models throughout his childhood and young adulthood. The last man at this second table in 1950, the one with the darkest hair and quickest smile became his father, the man J.J. knew only through stories and the book he left.

J.J. used to ache when he was a kid, seeing his cousins with their fathers, his insides turning in and out because he could not remember his own father. Even now, old man that he was, he still wanted his Dad.

"You look a little melancholy tonight, J.J.," the bartender said.

"No," J.J. sighed, "not melancholy. Just remembering watching my uncles play pool. My Uncle Nick had a pool table he inherited from my grandfather. Big old library room full of books and a rack of rifles and the pool table. Men were men in those days, Andy."

The bartender laughed. "You know, I think every man who ever existed looked back at the men who came before him and said the same thing."

J.J. laughed. "You're probably right."

The man at the table who became his father in J.J.'s imagination came over to him and handed him his cue. "Here you go, sir," he said, and J.J. realized for the first time how young he was. "Maybe you'll have better luck than I've had."

J.J. took the cue with a smile, and he dove into a game with the man who had become his Uncle Nick in his imagination. J.J. played like he was a pro. They bet a couple dollars per game, and after playing and drinking for a couple hours, J.J. walked away with enough money to pay for his beer and a few dollars for car fare and lunch the next day.

J.J. walked home smiling and wondering how he might develop a levitating pool table.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Thanksgiving 1880

"This telephone thing," Nick said after he'd missed a shot and while Heath was lining up his. "You think that might turned into something?"

Jarrod said, "Oh, yeah, it's a sure thing. Won't be very long at all you'll be able to pick this thing up and talk into it and do things like call the doctor to come out instead of sending a rider for him, or call your wife from town when you aren't going to make it home as soon as you said."

"Or she could call you," Carl said. "I'm not sure I like that idea."

"Well, nobody said you'd have to take her call if you didn't want to."

"Yeah, like we'd get away with that."

"When do you think we'll have a telephone around here?" Nick asked.

"Ten, fifteen years maybe," Jarrod said. "The wires would have to be run and some kind of network set up. But that won't take as long as you think. Then, maybe someday, I don't know when, you might not need the wires anymore. The telephone will work right through the air."

Heath made his first shot but missed his second, so it was Jarrod's turn. He lined up the shot he wanted and made it easily. The second worked out perfectly, too.

Nick said, "So without the wires, I guess you'll just carry this thing around in your pocket or something like that."

"I don't see why not," Jarrod said and made his third shot. "Carry it like a pocket watch. Maybe the thing will actually tell time, too, and you won't need a pocket watch."

Jarrod missed his fourth shot, and Nick took over.

"You do have some imagination," Heath said.

"Well, time will tell," Jarrod said. "No pun intended."

Heath laughed. "What about that horseless carriage thing some people are talking about?"

"That'll be here before you know it, too. I don't know if you'll be able to herd cattle in one, but it will probably go where buggies and surreys go now."

"How? What will make it go?"

Jarrod shrugged. "Electricity maybe, or some kind of coal oil or other fuel oil. Mark my word, it'll be here before J.J. turns 30."

"I guess that means Audra will be wanting one of them," Carl said, thinking. "How fast you think the thing will go?"

"Not fast at first, and if it's going to go really fast – like 30 miles an hour or so – the roads will have to be rebuilt and made smoother," Jarrod said. "It'll happen."

"Okay, I'll lay a bet on that," Nick said. "I don't see it, not in 30 years. Who will take me on? Five dollars."

Jarrod said, "I'll take that bet, but I'll do it on J.J.'s behalf. You can pay him off when you lose. He can use the money to help pay for his horseless carriage."

Heath laughed. "I'm with Jarrod. I'll take you on."

Carl shook his head. "I'm with Nick. Heath, you be the banker, though. I don't trust Nick one bit."

Everyone handed Heath the money.

June 1950

J.J. settled back into his room at his daughter's house and read another page of the Book of Imaginings by the light next to his bed. The page he wanted to read had two very old five dollar bills there as a bookmark. It was the ten dollars his uncles Nick and Carl had paid off to him when he was 30 and bought his first automobile.

He had kept that ten dollars all these years, marking the page in the book where his father had talked about the automobile and drawn a picture of what he thought it would look like. He called it a horseless carriage and it looked just like a buggy, but without the tongue for hitching a horse, and in the back was some kind of engine. His father had not drawn an actual motor, but he showed it spewing out some kind of exhaust, just as automobiles did.

His father had written, _"This is what some people are calling the horseless carriage. I expect that at first it will look just like a buggy but with some kind of motor in the back, but as you grow older I'm sure it will look different. I can't even imagine what that might be. It will probably have some covering where the passengers sit to protect them from the weather, but that's all I can picture right now. Anyway, when you turn 30, make sure you collect on a bet I made with your uncles Nick and Carl back on Thanksgiving Day in 1880. They owe you five dollars apiece."_

J.J. chuckled, remembering the day he collected. His uncles were older men then but still active, even still working their ranches though not as hard – and each one had an automobile of his own. They had tried to forget the bet, but J.J. had his Book of Imaginings to remember, and his Uncle Heath remembered too.

 _They had gathered in the Barkley mansion, in that room that still held the pool table, to play a game of pool after holding a little party for J.J.'s 30_ _th_ _birthday. Heath wouldn't even let them rack up the balls before he said, "We have something else to tend to first. Nick, Carl, it's payoff time."_

 _Nick played innocent. "Pay off what?"_

" _A certain bet we made back when J.J. was a baby," Heath said._

" _Yes, I know about that bet," J.J. said. "My father wrote about it in the book he left me and reminded me to collect."_

" _They're onto us, Nick," Carl said and reached for his wallet._

 _Nick reached for his, as well. "I should have known Jarrod would leave instructions. Man always was so focused on details it could make you sick."_

" _It was almost as tough to get something by him as it was to get something by Mother," Heath said._

" _So how did you come to remember?" Nick asked as he paid his brothers off._

 _Heath shrugged. "It was money. I don't forget money."_

J.J. remembered laughing at the look on his Uncle Nick's face as he paid off. He always screwed it up, pursing his eyebrows together, whenever he was doing or listening to something he didn't like. Then, when he was happy his face did the opposite, expanding into a grin and eyes getting wide and sparkling. Even now, just remembering that face, J.J. laughed.

He missed them so, all of them. Silly for an old man to feel that way, but he did.

J.J. put the book aside, crawled into bed and put out the light. The streetlights from outside his window lit up his room almost like the lights were still on, and somewhere in the distance he heard a siren howling. He wished sometimes he could close the window to shut the noise out, but that would also shut the cool night air out, and that would make it more difficult to sleep. Then he remembered something else his father had written about in the Book of Imaginings, and he smiled.


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Thanksgiving 1880

J.J. was crying when the men came in from the library and joined the women in the living room. Maggie was lifting him from the makeshift nest she had set up on the desk in the corner, and she immediately decided he needed changing. She took him upstairs to the bathroom to do the deed.

"You boys had some pretty good laughs in there," Victoria said. "We could hear you out here."

"Some of us play some pretty funny games of pool," Heath said as he stood behind Suzanne, who was on the settee beside Victoria. He gave her a kiss on the top of her head.

Nick had taken a place behind Nancy, who was in Jarrod's "thinking chair." "Some of us have some pretty funny ideas about the future," he said.

Jarrod stood by the fireplace. "They may sound funny now, but you wait, Nick. You're probably going to see a few of my ideas come about."

"Ideas?" Nancy asked. "You have some ideas about the future?"

"Indeed I do," Jarrod said, "and I'm writing them down to leave to my son, so he can see if many of them actually come about."

"I think that's a great idea," Audra said.

Suzanne said, "I do, too. What's so funny about dreaming about the future?"

"Some of those dreams are pretty hilarious," Carl said.

"You wait," Jarrod said. "You'll see some of them yourself."

"All right," Carl said, "I'll give you the telephone and maybe even the horseless carriage, but the indoor cooling system? I don't know."

"Indoor cooling?" Suzanne asked.

"Like indoor heating," Jarrod said. "I expect that someday – probably sometime during J.J.'s life – you'll be able to cool the inside of your home as easily as we heat it now."

"How is that going to happen?" Victoria asked.

"Well, I don't know the engineering," Jarrod said. "I'm just the idea man."

Victoria gave it some thought. "I suppose some kind of system using ice – "

"No, won't work," Nick said. "Nobody could make that amount of ice."

"Well, then, maybe some kind of way of keeping food cold would come first, some way that wouldn't require ice – maybe something like the way they make ice now," Heath said.

"There you go," Jarrod agreed. "Predicting the future gets kind of fun, doesn't it?"

"Well, I like it," Audra said, "and I'm sure someday J.J. will read your notes and look back and see a lot of these ideas have come true for him. I think that's a great gift to leave to your child."

"And remember, Nick, you said you might start such a book of ideas for your own kids," Jarrod said.

"So I did, so I did," Nick said. "Except I bet more of my ideas come about than yours."

"Want to make another bet?"

"You're betting on this?" Victoria said, unbelieving.

"Oh, Mother," Nick said. "Men will be on anything."

XXXXXXX

June 1950

J.J. had a dream, about the Book of Imaginings, and it was still dancing in his mind when he woke up in the morning. He had been dreaming about air conditioning, maybe because he had begun to feel warm during the night. His daughter's family did not yet have air conditioning in their home, even though units you put in the windows had been around for a while. His son-in-law thought they were too noisy, and J.J. agreed he had a point.

Before he got up, J.J. reached for his Book of Imaginings and turned to the page his father had made about "indoor cooling," as he called it. Oddly enough, his father had imagined a unit that fit into the window. He drew a picture and showed streams of air blowing out of it, into a room. His father had gotten that idea completely right, except it didn't look like he had accounted for the noise.

" _It'll probably be one of the most revolutionary ideas man ever had,"_ Jarrod had written. _"I don't know if you'll ever go to the South, but it is so hot and humid down there that a person can hardly take it. It's one of the reasons southern slave owners used to justify keeping slaves – that white men couldn't work in that weather. Indoor cooling might very well change the South, J.J., and at the very least, it will make you more comfortable."_

J.J. laughed and got himself up and dressed for the day. As he did, he had a thought. He wondered what his daughter was going to think.

"You want to write a book?" his daughter, Nancy Barkley Simmons, said as she set breakfast on the table for him.

J.J. always got up later than Nancy's husband and children, who were already out and about for the day. "Like my father's book. I'd like to do some imagining of my own."

Nancy had grown up with that book, even though she hadn't looked through it very often, and probably not since she was a teenager. "Well, I guess that might be a good idea. I mean, thinking about 70 years from now – 2020, wow! I can't even begin to imagine what things will be like."

"There'll be a lot more television around," J.J. said. "A lot more. Probably even in color instead of black and white."

Nancy said, "Hmm," thoughtfully.

"And maybe machines so you don't have to go out to the movies anymore – you can bring them into your home and run them right there. And maybe, who knows – maybe medicine will be so good that nobody will have to worry about their kid getting polio or even the measles. Maybe you can even get clothes to keep you warm in the winter that aren't so full of feathers that you can't move once you put a coat on. Can you imagine – all the photos of the kids you'll be able to laugh at – the ones where they look like the clothes are standing by themselves and the kids aren't even in there?"

Nancy laughed.

"And maybe cameras," J.J. said. "I mean, cameras these days are great compared to the big old boxes we used to see, but what do you think? Maybe they'll be no bigger than a deck of cards, or even smaller."

J.J.'s mind was beginning to run off in all kinds of directions, and he didn't even realize how much he was smiling.

Nancy laughed. "I'll bet right now you look a lot like your own father did when he first thought about the Book of Imaginings."

J.J. remembered how much his uncles said he looked like his father, and suddenly, there it was again, that feeling like his father was there beside him, looking over his shoulder. "Yeah," he said. "I'll bet."

XXXXXXX

Epilogue

October 1892

Twelve-year-old J.J. Barkley had been riding horseback on his own around the ranch for several years now, but this was the first time he ever felt the need to visit his father's grave alone. He knew it was because of the book his mother had given him on his birthday a week earlier, the Book of Imaginings that his father had left behind when he died so many years ago, before J.J. ever had a chance to know him. At first J.J. thought it was a pretty hokey thing for his father to do, but as he read it, he changed his mind. He liked the pictures, and the thoughts his father had written down in his own handwriting were fascinating to read. J.J. had started to think that his father actually had some smarts.

He hadn't come to this grave in a very long time. Now, alone here, he looked down and saw something more than just a stone that gave his father's name and the dates he was alive. Now, he actually knew a little something about the man who slept here.

"Hi, Papa," he said quietly. "Mama gave me your book last week. That's why I came by, to tell you how much I like it. I think it's pretty amazing that you saw some of the things you did. Like telephones – it looks like there are going to be telephones all over the country before too long. And horseless carriages – well, they're not really around yet, but in school we've talked about them, and everybody thinks that San Francisco at least will be full of them before very long.

"But what I really think, Pa – I think it was really nice that you made this book for me. Not having a pa has been tough. I get jealous sometimes. Don't tell Ma that – she'd be upset. And she's been a great mother, it's just – well, I missed out, not having you around. You're kind of around now, in a way.

"It's really kind of amazing – seeing your ideas about indoor cooling and other things that will run on electricity. Moving pictures, too, seeing stories just like we see plays in school, and even your flying machine ideas. Wow, to think I might actually see some of these things. I might even fly in the sky like a bird someday. That would be so incredible. I don't know about that levitating pool table, though. I think you kinda missed the boat on that one.

"Anyway, thanks, Papa. Thanks for making me the book. I'm gonna take good care of it so when I get really old, I can still look at it and do like Ma said you wanted, to see what you thought up that really came true. I think it would be great if a lot of your ideas did come around. Well, anyway, bye, Pa. And thanks."

J.J. turned to leave, but then turned back again. He said it in a low voice, because he wasn't sure how to say it, to the 12-year-old it sounded hokey. "Love you. Papa."

J.J. smiled, then mounted up and went home.

The End


End file.
